OLD SCHOOL AUDIO: Analog vs. Digital...

I have been hired to be the sound mixer on a 35mm short filming on April 10th & 11th. The director specifically requested that I record sound on the Nagra. The unit is pictured above, as well as in the blog title (though that is an antique model). For those of you unfamiliar with this piece of equipment, it is a reel-to-reel 1/4" tape recorder of extremely high quality. For many, many years it was the industry standard for capturing sound for motion pictures. It is still occasionally used as a prop in movies when the bad guy is "caught on tape," even though surveillance has long ago switched to digital tapping.

Despite continuing to offer extremely high quality audio, it has largely been replaced by digital for several reasons. For one, audio had to be transferred in real-time, and by design could only carry one stereo soundtrack. If the mixer delivered a bad mix, that's all there was to it. Newer digital models allow us to record the mix, plus additional tracks of audio isolated from the main mix. These are called ISO tracks, or stems. On top of that, the audio is CD quality, non-destructive, and can be dragged-and-dropped in minutes; ready-to-edit. The demise of Nagra was remarkably swift, indeed!

Still, there have always been a few audiophiles who have insisted that analog audio is better than digital audio; and this director wanted to be convinced. So we met at his place in Echo Park, right by Dodger Stadium, and headed into the woods with an analog mixer, the Nagra, and my digital Fostex recorder to do a test.

Now, I haven't ran a Nagra in years, not since I used one to capture audio for the Pansy Division documentary. In that case, the tape speed was somehow compromised, and it ended up taking six weeks just to sync sound to picture. So I vowed I was done with analog, but I still owned a unit that was sitting in my closet. Today, it came out of retirement. After a few moments, I remembered how to thread the machine and roll sound without getting it to play through the built-in loudspeaker.

We listened to the digital machine first. It was recorded a little hot (my fault), so there was some harmonic distortion. Basically, it was too hot. But the Nagra, which is known to be generally overload proof, held up fine and delivered perfect audio. When we ran a second take, the audio was much improved on the digital model, but the director still thought the audio on the tape sounded better.

So we made a compromise. I asked him to rent a big sound package with a better digital model, and I would send a feed to the Nagra and "print-to-tape." This way he could still have both. In the end, I think he will take the digital audio when he realizes how difficult it will be to transfer the audio to a media he can use (this is called an Analog to Digital Conversion, or A>D

conversion). But he's old school, so who knows. It was cool to break my old Nagra out in any case, and I'm looking forward to recording on it again. It's been a long time.

"Brooklyn": The Final Product

I did sound for a web series called Brooklyn last April. The producer just e-mailed us and said the first episode was printed and published on the web. I remember this one being a particularly difficult shoot, so I was interested to see how it turned out.

The production was quite large for a web series. The first day of shooting was in the desert; East of Palmdale. Even though it was the Spring, the temperature easily clocked 100°. On top of that, there was a lot of shooting top of a hill for the shots of Brooklyn as a sniper. Guess how we got up there? That would be by me carrying it up in one trip: mixer, recorder, Portabrace, boom, and all. There was a huge crew for picture, but they only hired me for sound (notice why it's just ME in the picture).

So that sucked. I also remember not being able to get a pole in there. Ever. They had two cameras shooting all over the place, so I usually only got to sync to one camera at a time. My friend Camille (below) had gotten me on the shoot, and she was much more comfortable than me doing make-up in the air-conditioned trailer.

I'm not sure if I would say things got better or worse the next day. Although we weren't shooting in the High Desert, we were shooting in Skid Row. And if you're thinking that the heat was more tolerable, it wasn't.

We were shooting in a near-condemned building on 7th St., and it was literally only a small bedroom. The room couldn't have been more than 12x12. No bathroom, no shower, NO KITCHEN. Only a sink. To do God's work, you had to go to a community toilet down the hall. Shower was at the other end, and I guess the residents cooked on hot plates. I found out that the rent was only $100 a month. The discount comes with a price; there were roaches everywhere. It really opened my eyes to how deeply the line between rich and poor is drawn in LA. These people didn't have a pot to piss in (literally), but less than 25 miles away was Beverly Hills.

Anyway, inside this tiny room we had to fit all of the lights, the Director of Photography, the Assistant Camera, talent, and me. Even the director couldn't fit in there. It took a long time to get the shots off because only a few people could fit in the room at a time. The crew was NOT happy.

It was very hard to get good sound in this place as well. The residents kept blasting Mariachi music, and it was difficult to get them to stop because no two people spoke the same language (and none of them spoke English). They did finally stop when we paid them. Of course, there was still plenty of city noise, air traffic, and sirens. Constantly sirens! We had to stop completely when there was a shooting down the street. There was just way too much 5-0.

The next day was a little better. We were shooting at an Eagle Rock coffee shop. I thought I was finally going to get good sound until I realized that the owners wouldn't let me turn off any of the refrigerators in the back. So there was a lot of buzz on most of the takes, which is why I'm guessing there's so much music in the final cut. I actually did get them to turn the damn things off when we were shooting in the kitchen, because it was just unmerciful.

All in all, it was still a good experience. The crew was very cool, and the job paid well. I wasn't very happy with how the sound came out, and that could be why I haven't heard from the producer or director since. However, I did end up working with the actor who played the homeless guy in a student short called "Altered Design."

Looking back, I was still kind of new to sound, and Brooklyn, at the time, was by far the biggest production I had done the mixing for. It definitely beat another day at the office. As a weird side note, one of the crew members looked so much like my brother Alex that I started to wonder if my parents were keeping a secret from me.

See episode 1 for free at http://www.brooklyntheseries.com. It has a lot of energy and I think will do well if it's picked up.

MY REVIEW: """ 1/2

Jen and I saw Scorsese's latest at a private screening at the Harmony Gold Theatre in Hollywood. I was very excited to finally see this movie; it was pushed back from the Fall of 2009. We both liked it, but I definitely enjoyed it more.

Shutter Island starts off with Federal Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonard DiCaprio) trying, and failing, to stomach the rough seas on the way to a maximum security insane asylum. It's 1954, and Shutter Island houses some of America's most dangerous criminals. One of them, Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer) has gone missing.

Almost immediately, the hospital begins to bring out the skeletons in Daniel's very dark closet. His baggage includes nightmares from his experience liberating Dachau and losing his wife to a building fire while he was on another case.

The real strength of the movie is how it requires quite a bit of investigation on the part of the viewer. With characters as creepy as this, the audience is hard pressed to trust pretty much anyone, including Daniel's partner (Mark Ruffalo) and the zealous chief psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley). And then there's the mental hospital: an Alcatraz of a mental hospital that truly puts you into another world. The art direction is worth the price of admission.

I won't say any more about the picture, since I hate spoilers. I will say that the writing was strong, and I was genuinely surprised at moments. All in all, I was very entertained. Then again, when Scorsese'ds name is on it, that's pretty much a guarantee.

[Shutter Island is in wide release]